Spy x Family vol. 13

The arc that wraps up at the start of this volume may have started out annoyingly dumb, but it at least concludes with some likeable dumbness.  Which involves Nightfall overcoming the limits of a human’s built-in damage restrictions to take out the enemy double-agent and send herself into the hospital afterward.  It’s all quite silly and made more enjoyable with how mangaka Tatsuya Endo delivers the female spy’s astoundingly melodramatic internal monologue against her outwardly cool exterior.  In all, it was great seeing Nightfall again and I hope it’s not too long before she returns.

Afterwards we get right back to the business and shenanigans of the Forger family’s daily routine.  This also includes Yuri as he angsts about his performance on the last mission and we find out that he’s been a zealous overachiever with a self-sabotaging streak for a while now.  Yor and Anya also encounter a lost old man in the park and help return him to his wife, a move which might lead to the latter getting her next Stella Star.  Following a too-short murder mystery, the action returns Eden Academy as the kids get ready to participate in the post-test party where Anya and Damien may wind up *gulp* dancing together.

All of this was an improvement over last time simply because there was nothing as egregiously dumb and irritating as Yor’s marriage concerns.  If anything, the biggest disappointment here was that the murder mystery which was set up in one chapter is dealt with so quickly after Anya reads the killer’s mind.  I thought we were going to get some fun, genre-busting hijinks in the process, but then the story ended.  It felt like Endo was all set to do a proper story in this genre until his editor reminded him that Anya could read minds and so he decided to wrap it up right there.

The rest of the volume is the kind of charming, silly fun that this series has built its reputation on since its start.  There are occasional stabs at long-term plotting here, but nothing to suggest that Endo is going to start moving things beyond the one-or-two-part gag-driven stories that we’ve been getting.  Which, as the quality of this volume indicates, is fine.  Still, I’m not feeling compelled to remain current with this title (unlike a certain other Shonen Jump series I haven’t talked about in a while…), so make of that what you will.